Virus in India different from one originated in Wuhan: scientists

HYDERABAD, India: A group of Indian scientists who have been working on understanding changes happening to the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has found that some structures of the virus are undergoing changes that show that the virus, in India, is diverging from the Wuhan strain, foreign media reported on Wednesday.

Scientists also cautioned that the overall low testing rate in the country and a smaller number of genome submissions are emerging as major bottlenecks in the assessment of the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in India.

According to Dr Syed E Hasnain, vice-chancellor of Jamia Hamdard and a former head of the city-based Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, the group studied approximately 4,000 SARS-CoV-2 sequences available in public databases, including strains sequenced in India.

“Other studies focused majorly on the genomic aspect of the virus. Our study evaluated both genomic as well as functional aspects of the virus in the Indian and global scenario. Large-scale analysis revealed significant changes in some proteins of the virus. We also focused on conserved proteins that can be targeted as potential diagnostic and intervention candidates,” Dr Hasnanin said.

The study by Jamia Hamdard, a deemed to be University in New Delhi, the United Kingdom-based BioInception Labs Pvt Ltd., an R&D company focused on drug discovery and diagnostics, and Hyderabad based Envirozyme Biotech Pvt Ltd. (India), an applied R&D biotech company, started looking at possible reasons why India, having the second largest population in the world, reported just 2 per cent cases and 0.9 per cent mortalities of the worldwide cases of COVID-19.

While global death average is 40 deaths per million, as on May 17, in India it was 2 per million. “We began investigating possible reasons for this,” Dr Hasnain said.